The British like to write about America. They've watched with nervous fascination over the centuries as their wayward child usurped the motherlode and became "top nation". Good old Norfolk boy Tom Paine helped the country start down its new path by teaching them a little Common Sense; Thackeray spoke of the Virginians, and Charles Dickens wrote of his travels along the east coast, during which he found New York muckier than Boston, got soaked alongside Niagra Falls, and, writing in 1842, foresaw that the "bloody chapter" of slavery would have to come to a "bloody end".

We like to write in America, too. It's hard to find a British writer of the 20th century who didn't nip over to America for a few semesters, enticed by the prospect of a large cheque in return for teaching wide-eyed undergraduates how to win the Booker. They'd often get a travel book, an essay or at least a chapter of the autobiography out of the transatlantic experience.

During that time he wrote about the deaths of Robert Frost, Westbrook Pergler and Marilyn Monroe. He witnessed the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and talked about an incomparable miscellany of topics that included the unhappiness of his fellow migrant Britons, the civil rights movement (about which the Guardian thought him too neutral), Labor day, Vietnam, dress codes, American slang, young bachelors in Manhattan, military etiquette, the LA riots, Halloween and just about everything else from high and low culture, serious and comical news, that he came across.

He was a straightforward man, always in a well-cut suit, who could scrutinise America and its inhabitants calmly and sometimes sceptically. Like a patient great uncle, returned from a few years abroad and offering his presents wrapped in brown paper, he would sit you on his lap and tell you of his adventures. In his astounding television series from the 1970s (entitled with typical plain speech, Alistair Cooke's America), he showed us the country from the Oval Office's red telephone to the nuclear silo it would call in emergencies; he roved from the farmlands to the hippy communes.

He was unreservedly in love with America but never forgot he was speaking to his old countrymen. Everywhere he stood he seemed slightly out of place, but he won his interlocutors over with his polite confidence. In one letter he talks about the absurd idea of himself attending a 60s "happening" in London: "The friendly attitude seemed to be: 'If this cat wants to dress like an American ambassador, then okay, so long as he keeps his trap shut about Vietnam.'"

To many, "keeping his trap shut" was Cooke's problem. He wrote with an unfashionable optimism about all sides of a political conflict, and found things to blame and praise. He was often accused of being frivolous; but that was what made him great. "At the risk of seeming callous or whimsical," he said, "I propose to go on having a thing about many other matters than Soviet expansionism, and the plight of the cities, and the nuclear arms race."

He knew, as he wrote elsewhere, that "politics will undoubtedly bedevil us all", and that the terrible things of this world, while they should be remembered and discussed, should not conquer us. It's what makes his writing, unlike that of a correspondent focused on long-forgotten elections or brewing diplomatic issues, a true account of what one country can mean to another.